The Written in Speech

JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

The gap between hearing and saying

The written is not to read
Michel Leiris and his Rules of the Game
An interpretation at the level of lalangue
The apparole, part of the apparatus of structure

We have met already five times this year and, to sum it up, have
taken a path going from homophony to the anagram, through multiple
examples of a literary nature*.

It seems to me that these examples have taught us something. What

have they taught us? First of all, to take things from the base, that there is
a gap between what is heard and what is said on condition that we agree
upon what what is said means.

In the usage that I employ on this occasion, what is said means what
is understood, what is communicated, what is posed as truth, presents itself
as something on the order of a proposition susceptible of being true or
false. This is a reminder that there are two dimensions, two places of the
said: what comes to the ear and what, of that, is understood. This is all the
more two places in that it is in disagreement, staggered.

The dimension of what poses itself as true is what Lacan designated

exactly as the thetic level of truth. Thetic is what poses itself as a thesis,
calling for an antithesis, and indeed a synthesis.

* This text if the sixth lesson of Jacques-Alain Miller’s course, L’orientation laca-
nienne, given through the Department of Psychoanalysis, University of Paris VIII,
1995 - 96, edited by Catherine Bonningue.
2 JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

There is another gap between what is written and what is read. We

had fun with the observation that there is more than one reading of what
is written.

For example, I brought in Saussure when he deciphers, in the

Saturnal poetry, his hypogram anagrams. He reads not only the words, but
exactly the «words under the words,» to use Starobinski’s expression, who
was, more properly, the inventer of these texts. He put them at the dispo-
sition of the lettered public, and I pointed out the attention they received,
in particular from Lacan and from Jakobson.

This anagrammatic reading constitutes the signifier as an enigma,

and in Saussure’s case, as if the signifier at the same time enunciated and
dissimulated exactly a proper name, even a famous, illustrious proper
name. We pause at the trembling, this shiver that occurs in the as if,
because Saussure himself was bothered by his certitude, worried by it to
the point of leaving the considerable collection of his notes on the subject
confined in drawers, from whence they were extracted much later. We are
in the as if, as if the signifier was, as such, a riddle [devinette].

The word devinette isn’t very serious. It’s an effect in French of the
suffix ette, like trottinette [scooter]. It brings with it a diminutive value,
and then it promenades like that, fresh and smart, Marinette style.

The riddle [devinette] doesn’t summon the soothsayer [devin], who

is otherwise weighted down, heavy, compromised. It only requires astuteness.
For the good reader, the informed reader, it’s a game like those that
Jakobson mentions in the Russian riddles, which were spelled out for us
the last time with sagacity1.

The Russian riddle — since we brought it up — presents itself as

such, an honest riddle; in other words, it admits to being a definition
enveloped in another signifier to be deciphered. But the Saturnal poem,
until Saussure’s reading — at least since the supposed, mysterious tradi-
tion of dissimulating the name anagrammatically had been lost — says to
nobody, «I’m a riddle.»

So, the riddle admits to being such.

What it hides nevertheless — when it is a Russian riddle of the

folkloric type remarked upon by Jacobson — is that it isn’t only the word
that solves it. According to Jakobson, it enunciates this word, hidden in its
very text, under a veiled form. Scattered throughout the text are fragments,
phonemes which, once assembled, give a presentiment of the word solu-
tion. The riddle anticipates the word, the signifier of the solution in its very
text. According to Saussure, the Saturnal verse is of a higher dimension

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 The Written in Speech 3

since it hides that it is even a riddle, and then it is only solved at the level
of the signifier.

I evoke this to bring you gently back to the amusing atmosphere of

the inanity of sound. As amusing as it is, it is very serious. The gap
between hearing and saying, between writing and reading, is the very gap
that arranges the place of analytic interpretation for us.

The interpretation concerned in the double gap I indicated, before

even calling it analytic, we note that it is obligatory, necessary. In what
way? In the sense that what is said in what is heard, what is read in what
is written depends on interpretation.

Here it isn’t a question of an extra interpretation. In the way I have

presented it to you, this is not a supplementary interpretation. On the
contrary, it is the obligatory passage from the signifier to the signified, to
employ familiar terms.

Between the signifier and the signified, there is interpretation.

We only get to this reduced formula because we have admitted,

given the weight of examples including those coming from Saussure, that
there is a staggering between the signifier and the signified. We do not take
the signifier and the signified as the recto and verso of a sheet of paper.

In his Course on General Linguistics, once his reading of Saturnal

verses had been forgotten, repressed, to illustrate how the signifier and
signified are joined, Saussure took the example of a sheet of paper from
which one cuts the top-side and the under-side with the same snip of the
scissors. If such is the relation of the signifier and signified, there is no
thickness of a sheet of paper between them. In this case, there is no
interpretation between the signifier and signified.

The canonic perspective left to us under the name of Saussure is

precisely — between signifier and signified, no interpretation. On the
contrary, our perspective of the first Saussure — the proto-Saussure, the
Saussure of the drawers — wholly, obligatorily reestablishes interpretation
between signifier and signified.

Saying that — truly at the base of the question, simply from these
ultra-reduced terms — doesn’t get to a complex interpretation. This doesn’t
suppose a fully equipped, finalized interpretation. It is an interpretation
that has the same degree of elementarity as the signifier and signified.
4 JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

I might evoke what an equipped interpretation is, so that you see the
difference. What is an interpretation that has rules? The rules of interpretation
have been specially formulated and refined for writing.

Since I’m covering this quickly, I’ll content myself with an allusion,
as I have done before, to medieval Christian exegesis of the Bible, since
one can make reference, in sum, to Pere de Lubac — four tomes entitled
Exegese medievale. This work gives us the system of interpretation of the
Book with a capital B, consecrated, from the Old and New Testaments,
such as it was practiced and such as it continues secretly to determine a
great deal of our textual approaches.

If you recall what I have already said before about it; you know that
it distinguishes a quadruple meaning of the Book. The terminology might
vary, but I will give the following: the literal interpretation which is
devoted to what is recounted, what is described, to the history; the allegorical
interpretation which puts faith into play; the moral interpretation where
you are in question for what you have to do or to not do; and the anagogic
interpretation which determines from the text that to which you tend, you
must tend as end. Here’s a system of interpretation that is a little heavy to
move. Saint Thomas, moreover, said that it mustn’t be used for everything.
He specifies that this quadruple focus must remain the privilege of the
sacred Book and that profane texts, to wit, the commentaries, did not call
for this four footed and handed machine.

Luther tried to throw all that overboard. He contested approaching

the text with this quadruple machine. It is sure that this machine was
extremely delicate to handle. And the constitution of a caste of those who
interpret, who know how to handle the quadruple meaning, followed soon
enough. Then Luther’s act had been to render the Book accessible to all,
and to take the entirely vigorous consequences.

Still, in the twelfth century — a blessed time, the time before Luther
— these rules were imposed on all interpretation of the Bible, Pere de
Lubac specifies. There, certainly, between the signifier and the signified
there is interpretation. There is a machine of interpretations.

I will leave to you those others who found that with four meanings
it wasn’t enough, and who brought in seven. The text of the Book was then
recognized as offering a multiplicity of meanings and a multiple understanding.
One said multiplex intellectus or spiritus multiplex, because, also to simplify
it, one can divide the four meanings between the literal on the one hand,
and slip the other three over to the order of spiritual or pneumatic.

The basis for all this was the difficulty in making the Old and New
Testaments agree. Saint John, in his Apocalypse, spoke of a book written
in recto and verso to qualify the set of Old and New. The people of the

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 The Written in Speech 5

Book didn’t have this difficulty, holding to the so-called Old Testament,
which is to say, unique. There is a special difficulty in according, relating
the Old and the New which was solved by the interpretation of the Old by
the New. The New Testament served as metalanguage for the Old Testa-
ment as language-object. At the same time, the New Testament continues
the Old, accomplishes it, and transfigures it. The one is to the other like a
letter to the spirit, according to the exegetes. The very operation of interpreting
the first by the second changes the letter into spirit and thus realizes a
mutation of meaning. This poses the difficulty of accounting for what, in
variable doses, persists of the continuity between the two sets and what is
marked by rupture.

We are back to homophony and anagram.

If there is duplicity, multiplicity, it is internal to the oral and written

as such. The multiplex is on a par with what is heard and what is written.
Without rules, without an interpretation machine, there is always the
possibility of passing to what is said and what is read, to interpret.

We speak as if it were justified to draw a parallel between oral and

written. Is it justified? I have been speaking about it since the beginning
to lead things along gently. It is not unjustified to draw a parallel between
the interpretation of what is heard and what is written, if, in the two cases,
we think of it in terms of the signifier.

But is it certain that the written, as such, has the status of signifier?

This question is all the more justified since Lacan, without its
having been read perhaps exactly in its due place, discovered, invented
another status for the written than that of the signified. If one wishes an
indication, it is marked in the fact that he ends up, in his elaboration,
decoupling what we have, since the beginning, accepted as coupled: writing
and reading.

Since the beginning, we have said what is written, what is read,

what is heard, what is said, as if it were given — will we be reproached
for it? — to consider that reading corresponds to writing. Yet, only taking
this indication that in the written, in Lacan’s sense, there is more or
something else than the signifier. He brings us, at the end of the first of his
seminars to be published, a little text in which he defines in a marked,
forced way the written as not to be read — and not, without equivocating
on the word, is a negation.

The written as such, in Lacan’s sense, is not to be read.

What’s all this about? What is being twisted here? And what justi-
fies separating writing and reading like that? I take only this as index; the
6 JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

definition of the written must have taken on a special torsion to succeed in

placing it at the same time outside what is said and outside what is read.
It concerns a strange status of the written, an extreme, radical status that
must be appreciated as such, and lacking which, it seems to me, a doctrine
of interpretation which refers to this zone of Lacan’s teaching would no
longer be able to sustain itself.

We will come to examine this extreme status of the written today,

but I must introduce you to it.

II

The Agency of the Letter, Lacan’s writing that bears this title, does
not give this extreme status to writing2. Rather, he discovers the written in
the very act of speaking. He discovers the gram in the phone. This text
leads to what is heard as being grasped, structured according to the linguistic
approach.

The structural linguistic approach, Saussurian from his Course on

General Linguistics, isn’t worried about acoustic identity as such. It isn’t
worried about frequencies, the variety of modulations; it doesn’t bother
with acoustic constance as such. In what is heard, the linguistic approach
of Saussure, of Jakobson, aims at other things than the properties, the
qualities of sound, such as one might examine them with what has been
developed today as analyzers, and even machines to produce sounds, so
that your computer talks to you in a friendly fashion, and it is more or less
able to recognize what you say to it — which we’re getting closer and
closer to every day. These little machines are put on the market for nearly
nothing. You say the name of someone, and it gives you the telephone
number right away, if you’ve been so kind as to enter it beforehand. There
is a machine that recognizes sounds. Nothing says that this apparatus won’t
call you one day with a voice that will seduce you. In any case, this is an
approach that is exactly not the one in question here.

The linguistic approach aims at a system, an articulated knowledge

present in what is heard when one speaks, an articulated knowledge in
which phonemes are opposed to one another, and are discerned in function
of the noticeable semantic differences in a given language. They are
isolated by multiplying the tests of commutation. The moment a change
will make a difference in meaning, one knows that one has isolated a
phoneme through opposition to another which, put in its place, changes the
meaning. Lewis Caroll gave us many amusing examples of this.

This phonemic system — reduced to a bundle of distinctive traits in

the Fifties by Jakobson with the aid of Morris Halle — is the system

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 The Written in Speech 7

presented by Lacan in The Agency of the Letter as equivalent to type set.

This structured system is like type set when printed characters were
materialized in the form of little lead objects. He saw in the phonemic
system of lalangue what already in speech prefigured the press, anticipated
printing. He writes, in his Ecrits:

...an essential element of the spoken word itself was predestined to

flow into the mobile characters which...render validly present what we call
the ‘letter’, namely, the essentially localized structure of the signifier3.

He treats the system of phonemes like a system of letters. He

precisely states: «the phonemic structure is literent.» The word ‘literal’ is
modified for reasons I’ll explain later. The letter thus presentifies what
detaches the signifier from the signified.

This is indeed what a type character is, such as is found in boxes at

the printers. The type character, the literal character is, as such, detached
from the value of signification that it only acquires through its combination
in monemes. It mustn’t be held that this was only Lacan’s point of view in
approaching the question, because he repeats exactly the same thing at the
end of his Ecrits in Science et la verite [Science and the truth], where he
defines the signifier, at first, as acting separately from its signification and
sees in this a trait of the literal character4.

What he calls the letter is the signifier as detached from any value
of signification and localized in a materiality that is presented to us in the
type character, but that is no less localized when it is a phoneme in a
system of opposition. In other words, in speech there is already the equivalent
of this writing that we see elsewhere deposited on paper, namely that we
ourselves reproduce approximatively. The example that he proposes at the
end of the Ecrits is the phallus as signifier that is imprinted, and always in
an ill-timed fashion, in disagreement with development because it is never
the exact, biological sign of the partner, nor the sign of copulation as such.
Moreover, this implies a subject who would not be the biological individual,
nor the subject understanding.

If the letter is the signifier as such, which is to say, in its separation

from the signified, writing is at this level. This is hardly an interpretation
on my part. The second part of The Agency of the Letter is entitled «The
letter in the unconscious,» demonstrating the unconscious structured like
a language. On what basis? In demonstrating exactly that when it concerns
the unconscious, we are dealing with writing.

When, a dozen years later, the philosopher, Derrida, proposed his

reflection on what he called grammatology, what he named an archi-
writing, a primordial writing that is not writing debased in relation to
speech, and which would be a constant in the history of philosophy, Lacan
8 JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

would say — «This is about what I called, before any grammatology, the
agency of the letter.» In a lively, unfriendly enough fashion, Lacan asserted
paternity over this idea, for having isolated, in The Agency of the Letter,
what there is of writing in speech.

Lacan demonstrated that we are dealing with writing by using a

dream, in showing that the dream image is retained by Freud for its value
as signifier, which has nothing to do with its signification. This is what
Lacan distinguished in what Freud offers as example when he says the
dream is to be read like a riddle. To say that the dream is read like a riddle
is to say that the image doesn’t count as a figure, a figured sign, nor as a
pantomime either, but as a letter. This is, in an elective manner, for Lacan,
an illustration or prefiguration of the symbolic — the letter which is to be
deciphered, whose meaning is hidden, and cryptogram up to its inscribing
itself from a lost language to be reconstituted.

Whenever the symbolic must be illustrated, Lacan takes special

recourse to the letter, not only to mark this presence of writing in the
dream, or even the structure of language appearing as equivalent to the
status of writing, but it is also the same inspiration that presides at the
construction of these **alpha, beta, ** by little letters which are not to be
deciphered. But in this famous example, the property of overdetermination
of the symbolic is illustrated by combinations of letters. One sees the
affinities between the symbolic and the letter. The letter appears to be no
more than another name for the signifier, the name of the signifier when it
is separated from signification, when it is just there, dumb as a box of
rocks. This brings Lacan, in his Encore5, to give as the sole, distinctive
trait of the signifier, as predicate for all the signifiers, precisely stupidity.
The signifier is dumb because the signified, all the other signifiers are
elsewhere, so it remains without having, in and of itself, much to say to us.

What Lacan calls significance holds exactly to that, and he on

occasion proposes it as translation for Traumdeutung, the significance of
the dream. There is reading there. At the same time that he advances the
status of writing in the dream, he speaks of the analytic operation of
reading.

All this Agency of the letter joins writing with reading, a reading
that is deciphering because the signified is to be rediscovered, to wit, read,
and knowing how to interpret supposes a structure of language.

One also sees in this what is the exact relation between significance
and semantism. Everything rests on the fact that signifier and signified are
not like the right-side and wrong-side. On the contrary, the less semantism
there is, the more significance there will be. There is more significance in
that the signifier functions more like a letter, separated from its value of
signification. This more-signifier is what one might call the poetic effect.

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 The Written in Speech 9

For example, when one follows through the different drafts for
Mallarme’s poems, it is clear that he proceeds through a progressive
occulting of the signified, that he progressively chases out the signification
of the first approach, that from which he writes the poem, and that he then
crosses out more of the significance in an enigmatic style. He tries to
obtain an anagrammatic effect, what he calls «a field under the text,» or,
as he said, a «mirroring from beneath.» I’ll take up Mallarme again later.

I can bring you a little example with which Michel Leiris begins his
Rule of the Game. It is three little pages to narrate an experience from
childhood. Some of you perhaps remember it.

He plays with his little lead soldiers. One falls. He ought to break
hitting the floor. He doesn’t break. «Keen was my joy,» he says. «This I
expressed in saying,» — he is a little child who doesn’t yet know how to
read or write — «...Appily!» He is then told, «You mean Happily. Say
Happily.»6 Little Michel believed that when things turned out for the best,
one said: «Appily!»

He then describes himself meticulously, as disconcerted because for

him Appily is much more expressive than Happily. Appily is truly a pure
ejaculation. One discovers that, in this Appily, his joy, his jubilation was
truly, entirely expressed, in this case, at having avoided the breaking of the
little soldier, his little rifle, his little sword.

This ejaculation is truly a jouissance that finds its adequate signi-

fier.

Here is an illumination, as he says, «a tearing of the veil, a bursting

of the truth.»7 He discovers that there is a real meaning to the word, as he
expresses it, «its meaning in the language,» and that one must say like
everyone else — Happily.

One has the feeling that it’s finished, that it’s all over now. He will
have to write interminably his Rule of the Game.

The rule of the game is that one must say it like everyone else. At
that moment, the word finds itself inserted in a whole sequence, he says,
«of precise significations,» and «what before was something truly belonging
to me found itself socialized.»8

He says, «It belonged to me.» It was, all the same, already caught
up in what he thought, what for him was said in what he heard. The
socialization was in fact, without a doubt, already present in Appily.

But that’s how he presents this little apologue seized by communi-

cation. He concludes this little piece thus: «This is what made me feel how
10 JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

articulated language, arachnean tissue of my relations with others, escaped

me, sprouting everywhere its mysterious antennae.»9

This stunning little example — that he develops a little later in the

second fragment of Rule of the Game — begins with the following words:
«When one doesn’t yet know how to read...» He tries to capture what
lalangue is before one has learned to write and read. «What are words
when one learns them only by hearing them?» he asks10. And he reconstitutes
it. There are few examples like this of the anamnesis of the very language,
of the insertion of the subject into language.

He gives us a descriptive essay on the mode of the speaking being

in language before the alphabet, before, as Lacan says in his postface to
Seminar XI11, the subject is alphabetissed12. He shows us a subject who
has to deal with a sort of monster, «oral monsters» as he expresses it, where
liaisons are made that do not respond to the lexical order, where there are
foggy effects, assonances, singular cuts, where the most banal sentence can
become, because one hears it a little bit askew, he says, «the sentence the
most obscure that has ever escaped the lips of the oracle.»13

The oracle is an elective reference of Lacan’s on interpretation. The

oracle here arrives without soothsayer, simply by misunderstanding, when
one doesn’t take as criteria the way in which it is written and lexicalized,
when one is uniquely hearing it. One has the same experience each time it
is a question of a language that one doesn’t know how to speak, nor read.
But one has no idea, at the moment, of how what is heard is cut into words,
while here there are singular cuts which make, precisely, the monsters.

He links these oral monsters to the effect and charm of the songs one
learns, where there is a play between music and speech, and where, he
says, «are amalgamated in enigmas insoluble rites, sonorous contents,
values significant of words and melodies.» I’m going to read you a little
passage:

The phrases imbibed of music acquire a very special luster which

separates them from common language, giving them the nimbus of a
prestigious isolation. More effective treatment than the vulgar typographical
artifices...14

After the songs, he also evokes those fixed syntags that proper
names give us. «All that, one way or another, was qualified by a particular
appellation in which figured a proper name, which became in effect its
name and made of it a sort of person, a being gifted with his own life,» —
perhaps we don’t have the same products anymore — «such as the phos-
phate Falieres, the anise of Flavigny, Bar-le-Duc jams, the apple sugar of

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 The Written in Speech 11

Rouen and among other medicines, Manceau syrup, Ramy gum, the ‘tranquil
balm’...beings who emerged, thanks to the markers that their names constituted,
from the quasi-indistinct mist of things...»15

He holds specially in his memory the jouissance given him by the

verse of a duet from Manon Lescaut sung by his sister: «Goodbye, our petit
table!» What he kept as cut-out of this verse was «tetable.» He evokes this
marvelously,

Tee-teh-tah. The ‘eh’ of ‘te’ between the ‘ee’ of ‘ti’ and the ‘ah’ of
‘ta’ far from being skipped is sufficiently accented so that the syllable
«teh» takes on a sort of consistence, thickens, tends to metamorphose into
an object, and, leaving the adjective ‘petit,’ it glues itself to the substantive
‘table,’ which designates a solid body, a volume make of heavy wood...thus
was our table changed into tetable, into totable, and become masculine
noun to baptize I don’t know what sort of bizarre instrument: a stable, a
retable, a totem, a sink flowing with potable or nonpotable water, whatever
vocables came to my mind in this moment to label an indefinite thing of
which I simply knew that it was an object, a thing occupying a bit of space
in a room where the Grieux and Manon said goodbye, a thing that was at
the same time indeed a table and a little bit more than a table to which was
added this particular quality which entirely transformed it...16

There he evokes a world peopled, through the effect of these names,

by fantastic objects which could only be mishearing. I refer each one of
you to your memories.

What Lacan called lalangue in one word is tetable. It is up to us to

indicate this Leirissian operation that makes us read in a single word the
article and substantive — lalangue.

Lalangue is what one makes of language through writing, but that

we find, as such, or such as Leiris here gives us a glimpse, integrally
subjected to the equivocal, definable through the equivocal meanings it
permits. One grasps in this example what Lacan meant when he said that
a language, lalangue, is none other than the integrality of the equivocal
meanings that the subject’s history lets persist there. This shows us the
malleability with the pathematique effects which follow for the subject
Leiris.

Leiris had always tried to write as closely as possible to lalangue.

He borrowed the means to do it from limericks, alliterations, phonetic
games until the end of his works. I can only recommend to you the
astonishing work called Langage, tangage 17 where one finds a part of the
12 JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

Glossary about which I have already spoken. He plays precisely on the

phonemic difference. There he shows himself, as he says, «devoured by the
desire to declaim,» perfecting in writing a language that sees itself as an
initiation of sorts — «shifted language, or even danced.» He doesn’t copy
Queneau; he doesn’t try to introduce spoken language into the written, but
he takes care to mark, he says, «to liven up the written by its timber.»
Moreover, he makes a precise distinction between the recourse to orality
as practiced by Queneau and what he calls his recourse to vocality. I hope
to have the occasion to take up again this very fine difference.

III

Returning to interpretation, what is interpretation of the analytic

order if its correlate is not language, but lalangue?

In Lacan’s theory, many doctrines of interpretation have followed

one another. We more or less drag them all around with us, we who go
through his works. This is why we haven’t always dropped what should
have been dropped when Lacan constructed us an interpretation at the level
of lalangue, which restores lalangue, and which attacks the very relation
between what is heard and what is said.

Doubtless, one might say of this interpretation that its site and
means are the equivocal, insofar as it bears on a dimension that is the very
same as the integrality of the equivocal.

To grasp what Lacan said in the latter part of his teaching, one must
replace oneself in the dimension of lalangue, where the word is yet something
belonging to me, like Appily.

The equivocal, without doubt, gives us a thread running through the

whole of Lacan’s elaboration. For example, in the third part of The Function
and Field of Speech and Language, which is especially devoted to the
question of interpretation, one finds a reference to animal language — it
dates from 195318. In 1972, in L’Etourdit, being about the same question
of interpretation, one also finds reference to the notion of language among
animals — more or less in the same terms — which highlights what is
lacking when one locates use of symbols among animals — the equivocal19.
The bee always says Happily. It never says Appily.

In The Function and Field of Speech and Language, Lacan denies

this animal symbolism the quality of language in saying, This is not a
language. It is only a code, only a system of signals which is dominated
by the search and finding of the referent.20 For example, one transmits

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 The Written in Speech 13

with exactness what one must to direct the swarm. In L’Etourdit, on the
contrary, he accepts the notion of language among animals, but in remarking
that there communication is always univocal, and that one doesn’t find
among animals equivocal symbols.

Why does he deny this symbolism the quality of language in 1953?

And why does he accept it in 1972? It is because in the meantime, the term
communication had changed value for him. He no longer defined language
essentially by communication. Even if one can follow the thread of the
equivocal through Lacan, there is a rupture on the very term of communi-
cation, a gap with which one must deal in spite of what one has learned in
reading Lacan. In 1972, it doesn’t bother him at all to use the word
communication concerning animals. He explains it in a chapter of Encore:
Firstly, it is generally enunciated that language serves to communicate,
communication implies a reference, lalangue serves everything else but
communication. That is more or less the discovery Michel Leiris translates
for us. When it is taken charge of, seized by communication, it is already
something else than what it was for him, to wit, the expression, as such, of
his jubilation. That is what is lost between Appily and Happily. That
language serves everything else but communication, Lacan assigns to what
the experience of the unconscious has shown us, insofar as the unconscious
is made of lalangue.

Taking only that, there is, at the so-called level of lalangue, another
end than that of communication. Leiris expresses this in saying that, for
him, it was a pure ejaculation. The end concerned in that which comes in
place of communication and that Lacan privileged; it is the end of jouis-
sance, to the point of qualifying communication as pretend.

What becomes problematic, if one aims at the dimension of lalangue,

and if one evacuates it of communication? It must be said; it is the
intervention of the analyst.

When one locates oneself on language, and one refers to it essentially

as communication, one knows what the analyst has to do, at least he is in
a communication situation.

Why does the nature of interpretation become so difficult to specify

at the level concerning lalangue? It is because communication as an end
disappears. It isn’t only the intervention of the analyst that becomes
problematic then. Teaching itself must be stitched together in a certain
way. This is what we observe after a certain date in Lacan’s elaboration.

When Lacan tells us — The experience of the unconscious shows us

that the essential end of what is concerned is something else than commu-
nication — it must be remembered that his first doctrine of interpretation,
14 JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

on the contrary, related language to communication. Certainly, after the

fact, one can already locate a tension in Lacan’s inaugural gesture concerning
interpretation, a tension between resonance and communication. In effect,
in The Function and Field of Speech and Language, Lacan highlights what
he calls «the resonances of speech.»

He invites us to set in motion the resonances of speech, to restore

to speech its full, evocative value, and he specifies that, in resonance, the
function of language is not to inform, but to evoke. Here one has the
feeling that he is outside communication, that he emphasizes the non-
communicative elements, non-communicational to use Habermas’s
terminology. And in a way, yes. When Lacan evokes, at the start, the
resonances of speech, he highlights the poetic function of language, which
is to say the effects that overflow communication as information about a
reference, communication as univocal information. But at the same time,
the poetic effect of resonance is dominated by communication. It is still a
mode of communication, not as information, but as evocation, in other
words exactly like indirect communication.

Resonance is a property of speech that consists in making heard

what is not said. He calls resonance a metonymic property of speech. The
poetic is metonymic. Interpretation doesn’t speak in this regard, and is thus
silent. But at the same time that it doesn’t speak, it makes heard, and there
it is noisy. It is all the more noisy indirectly for being silent. This is where
Lacan announces already the saying askew of the half-said [mi-dire] that
he will develop afterwards as the mode of saying proper to interpretation.

Obviously, there is a tension between resonance and communica-

tion, but what he calls resonance is all the same necessarily a communica-
tion. It’s just that it is a communication by an indirect route. Finally, there
is also a reference, but the reference concerned in resonance is the subject
himself.

It isn’t a question of this subject informing himself about himself.

It concerns evoking himself to transform and even invoking himself to
transform himself.

Lacan’s starting point is that at the heart of interpretation there is an

intimation. All the same, there is an imperative value to interpretation.
This is why he takes his bearings in the statements, You are this, You are
my master, You are my wife, etc.. His starting point is interpretation insofar
as metaphor for the subject. Even if it is a metaphor sort of said askew, a
metaphor that one only makes heard, an indirect metaphor.

We know about interpretation as transformation of the subject. It is

what Lacan called recognition. His starting point is the idea that interpretation

© Courtil Papers, 2003

 The Written in Speech 15

is fundamentally recognition, except that to be effective, it is made on the

bias, indirectly. This supposes, of course, that the subject is animated by
a desire for recognition.

This base of the doctrine of interpretation must be recalled to then

recall that Lacan disconnects interpretation and recognition, and that this
disjunction remains essential. He disconnects interpretation and recogni-
tion, and simultaneously he disconnects desire and recognition.

From thence comes the promotion of the term identification, and the
theme interpretation and identification is still current. It is this double
disjunction — disjunction between interpretation and recognition, and
disjunction between desire and recognition — that installs the question of
identification at the heart of the question of interpretation.

What is the desire for recognition? — that Lacan went and drew out
of Kojeve? The desire for recognition, which is supposed as such for the
subject, is, in fact, a request for identification.

At first it was placed in the line of request for identification to

correct, no doubt, to posit that interpretation, insofar as it aims at desire,
plays against identification. And insofar as identification is always identi-
fication to signifiers, Lacan ended up generalizing this term in speaking of
the master-signifier.

It was much more simple to propose this as the goal of interpretation

than to identify the subject. When he said recognition, it was a mode of
identification. He proposed identification as end of interpretation because
identification is always identification to signifiers.

That can be done with speech. The power of speech is essentially

the power to identify the other, on condition of enunciating it from the
right place. One can identify the other. The doctrine of interpretation that
works the best is that which promises identification, the right identification
no doubt. Interpretation becomes much more perplexing when it must play
against identification, when it must disidentify. This is Lacan’s constant
line, from shortly after he sets out.

What remains of the process of identification? In any case — and

this is good up to the end — what remains is that the being of the subject
outside identification cannot be designated by a signifier. Lacan will call
that the being for death. At this moment, interpretation must aim at the
subjectivation of death. What is more, Lacan will define the being of the
subject as a lack-of-being21. Interpretation must then aim at the subjectification
of the lack. In this regard, one can restore indirect resonance, allusion.
This is what Lacan does when he evokes Saint John pointing his finger to
16 JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

the empty sky. In any case, signifying the being of the subject is identifi-
cation. Thus, one cannot positively designate it by a signifier proposed in
the interpretation until Lacan had defined the being of the subject in an
object, a desubstantialized object, non-substantial, and until he gets to a
subjectification of the object little a. But there, one fails to pronounce the
terms subjectification of the object. Indeed, it is rather the subject who is
eclipsed there. Lacan speaks of subjective destitution.

With these beacons you can perhaps see what persists as a thread
through Lacan and at the same time what brings us to something new.
Interpretation necessitates a new definition of speech if it is to be at the
level of lalangue.

When Lacan proposed as end of interpretation to realize the iden-

tification of recognition, speaking of speech still made sense, had a value.
We can’t be sure that speech still holds the same value, the same meaning
when it concerns speech at the level of lalangue.

What was this speech that Lacan had made an essential function of
psychoanalysis since 1958? Speech was inscribed in a circuit of question
and answer. Speech was waiting for the response of the Other. It was also
my question as subject. In this way, Lacan could write, «What I search in
speech is the response of the other. What constitutes me as subject is my
question.»23 Here is a definition that is consequent. But, for example, what
little Michel Leiris searches in his speech is absolutely not the response of
the Other. And when it comes, it cuts his effects; on the contrary, it
devitalizes his speech. What constitutes him as subject of Appily is not at
all a question. As he says so well, it is an ejaculation — Keen was my joy.
At the level where we grasp Appily, it is not at all a question of a speech
that would be caught up in the circuit of question and answer.

It is easier to conceptualize analytic interpretation when one conti-

nues to adhere to the idea that interpretation is a response. Until he brings
up lalangue, interpretation is a response for Lacan. But from the moment
he isolates the dimension of lalangue, interpretation is no longer a response.

This necessitates something other than speech as question and answer.

What is marvelous is that there is something else in Lacan. Once again, he
furnishes us that also, that by which we might grasp captivated speech, the
concept of twisted speech, when it doesn’t concern question and answer
but essentially the relation to jouissance. He says, in L’envers de la
psychanalyse, «The incidence of the signifier in the destiny of the speaking
being, this has little to do with his speech.»23 This is an enormous change
for the one who wrote The Function and Field of Speech and Language,
where on the contrary the incidence of the signifier is marked above all by
the speech of recognition or of non-recognition. «This has little to do with

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 The Written in Speech 17

his speech,» Lacan says, «this has to do with the structure, which is
outfitted. The human being [...] has only to apparole himself to this
apparatus.»24 He proposes us a mixture of speech and apparatus.

Well, I propose that speech is part of this structural apparatus. A

few years later, one finds this specification with the same word apparatus.
Lacan, in Encore, says, «Reality is approached with apparatuses of jouis-
sance. There is no other apparatus than language.»25 He proposes a renovated
definition of language: not as means of communication if not as apparatus
of jouissance. In a text of the same period, one finds a single, isolated
instance of the term apparole.

Well, I say that what he is trying to discern by apparole and that we

can take as a beacon, even if he only said it once — there are little shards
that I just indicated — is the new concept of speech that calls for the
transformation of the concept of language into a concept of lalangue.

Apparole is the proper name of speech as apparatus of jouissance.

The interpretation in question, whose contours are difficult to define, is an
interpretation that is supported and aims at the apparole as apparatus of
jouissance.

Certainly, the apparole doesn’t leave us to think of it in the overhanging

terms of a metalanguage, nor to transform it into a language-object, if one
intends by language-object what Bertrand Russell, for example, does with
it in his investigation of meaning and truth, which is a primary language,
a language without subject.

I’ve stopped myself at the edge — this happens often. I have

perhaps familiarized you a bit with the concept of lalangue. I have been
able to pass on to you what modifies the concept of speech into apparole.
I’m left, for next time, to bring you what renovates the position of The
Agency of the Letter in a manner coherent with lalangue and apparole.

What renovates The Agency of the Letter is, of course, what Lacan
called Lituraterre26. In place of the function of speech, the field of language
and the agency of the letter, we have lalangue, apparole and lituraterre,
which certainly gives us another picture of Lacan.
18 JACQUES-ALAIN MILLER

1 cf. Roman Jakobson. Une Vie dans le langage, Auto portrait d’un savant. Editions
de Minuit, 1984.[trans. note].
2 Jacques Lacan. «The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud.»
Ecrits: A Selection. trans. A. Sheridan, Norton, 1977; pp. 146 - 178.
3 Jacques Lacan. «The agency of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud.»
Ecrits: A Selection. trans. A. Sheridan, Norton, 1977; p. 153.
4 Jacques Lacan. «Science et la verite,» Ecrits Seuil: Paris, 1966; p. 875.
5 Jacques Lacan. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, book XX: Encore (1972 - 73), trans.
B. Fink, Norton, 1998.
6 Michel Leiris. Biffures in the series Regle du jeu. Gallimard, 1985; p. 11.
7 Ibid.; p. 12.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.; p. 13.
11 Jacques Lacan. Le seminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XI: Les quatre concepts
fundamentaux de la Psychanalyse, Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Seuil, 1973. The post-
face was not translated in the English edition, unfortunately. [trans. note].
12 The word betisse means stupidity so that this commentary on the alphabet must be
referred to what is said earlier in this article on stupidity, ie. the level of the signifier
as such.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.; p. 18.
15 Ibid.; p. 18 - 19.
16 Ibid.; pp. 20 - 21.
17 Michel Leiris. Langage Tangage,ou ce que les mots me disent. Gallimard, 1985.
18 Lacan, Jacques. «The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis.»
Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, Norton, 1977; pp. 30 - 114.
19 Jacques Lacan. «L’Etourdit.» Scilicet #4, Seuil:Paris, 1973; p. 47.
20 Jacques Lacan. «Function and field...» Op. cit.; p. 84.
21 Manque-a-etre which Alan Sheridan translated as «want-to-be» and which presents
some interesting possibilities in its connotations with the «wanna-be» as semblant,
pretender, but which avoids or occults the idea of a lack. [trans. note].
22 Jacques Lacan. «The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis.»
Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, Norton, 1977; p. 86.
23 Jacques Lacan. Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, livre XVII: L’envers de la psycha-
nalyse. Seuil, 1986; p. 57.
24 Ibid.
25 Lacan. Encore. Op. cit.; p. 55.
26 Jacques Lacan. «Lituraterre.» Ornicar? #41, Seuil: Paris, 1987; pp. 5 - 13.

© Courtil Papers, 2003